


the fortune of dark corridors

by sweaters (cuimhl)



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M, cameo for the other double date duo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 05:36:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7562425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuimhl/pseuds/sweaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>an uninspiring tale of two lost boys and the inexorable passage of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the fortune of dark corridors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aotaru_Kimeru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aotaru_Kimeru/gifts).



> this is for the wonderful shin!  
> happy birthday, my friend. being super cheesy is a part of my nature, so i won't take offence if you cringe. thank you for putting up with me a lot - i've always felt at a loss during conversation, a super awkward bean, but you've done so much more for me than i think you realise. it means a lot to me to have met you, and sometimes i can't believe the times we've shared! it's honestly been such a joy, and even though we have (very) limited contact, you're still one treasured presence whose memory always, _always_ makes me smile. please keep being the incredible person you are. i've loved every single moment! from clowns to elevators to the silence of afternoons, my happiness doesn't fit in the box where i'm trying to stuff away the memories. here's to a magnificent life for a magnificent person!
> 
> this is a really sorry excuse for writing! i wanted to put in so many inside jokes but...i'm not....very funny...so please accept this! (also i am so immensely sorry that it's not finished yet - i overestimated my speed of writing. bad idea.) and to anyone else who reads, sorry again and thank you for the effort! :^)

 

It’s mid-July, sometime when summer consumes the sky whole, a king’s feast for lunch. Heat shimmers on downhill tarmac, and sweat lingers on fingertips like loneliness craving the reminder of touch. Kuroo cradles a litre of cold milk against his chest, curling his lip at the coldness of the ice-cream bar between his teeth. His footsteps are too soft against the concrete, sound smothered by the blanketing heat pulsing from the ground under his feet, and the night is hardly dark as his skin glows under the streetlights.

He reaches his apartment without thinking much at all, the thoughts lost somewhere between here and there and stamped flat under his tongue. Maybe it’s midnight, maybe it’s past - this is the time of day he likes best. Silence solidifies like a swarm of wasps, buzzing in his ears, deliciously tense as the sound of traffic slices ineffectively through the mutable, viscous air.

The lobby is nearly empty as he punches the button for the elevator, scraping his teeth against the ice-cream stick and closing his lips around midwinter in the caverns of his mouth before tossing the stick into the trash. He likes it this way. Company is thrilling, but undoubtedly taxing, and Kuroo has never been one to play around with things too far beyond necessary.

When the elevator doors ping open, someone steps into the elevator with him. Absently, Kuroo hugs the milk closer to his chest and side-eyes the stranger, a small boy who looks not fifteen, dark hair falling across his eyes.

“Hot night,” he says by reflex, polite greetings as inextricably stamped against his skin as the tangle of insecurity and impulsiveness that starts up in his gut.

“Hot,” the boy agrees, voice flat.

 

/

 

Every day, Kuroo finishes his afternoon shift at the florist’s at 6pm. He ducks into the convenience store for necessities, a customary bowl of instant ramen in hand, and walks the five blocks down to his apartment. Every day, he finds himself with his guitar in the bar across the street, humming to the sound of Akaashi’s voice against the microphone, and gives up looking for faces through the hazy lighting. 11pm, Bokuto thanks the crowd and they shuffle offstage; maybe they stay for drinks. Maybe they don’t.

He has a routine.

Kuroo compartmentalises, places his florist duties in a box labelled _patience_ and his music endeavours in a tub scrawled all over with, _what feels right._ His post-performance walk around the streets is _consequences_ and the lonely elevator ride up to his place is unnamed. The silence fuels something he didn’t know existed, churning through his stomach.

Now it’s different, though - now Kuroo has to shove the elevator ride in a new box, this time _things I can’t name._ It seems like the stranger has a routine, too, one involving elevator rides at 1am and stony silence in time as slow as molasses.

Together, they ride up eleven levels in a breathy quiet that congeals between them, hardly dented by the pings of the elevator. It’s not something he’s necessarily unused to, though. so Kuroo huffs a lock of hair from his eyes and curls his shoulders in and out experimentally. He can deal with awkward silences.

Still, it’s not without gratitude and gladness that he stumbles out onto the eleventh floor when they arrive, and the boy never meets his eyes as the doors shut between them.

 

/

 

“Do you know about the new guy?”

Kuroo and Bokuto have only one thing to themselves which Akaashi does not join them for, and that is Friday Night Indulgence. With a large margherita pizza spread between them, a trashy and overdramatic romcom playing in the background, it’s everything that screams friendship to the ends of the earth.

“What, the one with hair like a wet shihtzu?”

“A black one,” Kuroo nods in agreement. “Which floor does he live on?”

“Dunno.” Bokuto digs the heels of his socked feet into Kuroo’s lap, cramming pizza crust into his mouth. “Why do you care?”

Kuroo shrugs, because he doesn’t know. “I don’t know.”

After a pause, “get your filthy feet of me, you pig.”

 

/

 

Logically speaking, the new boy probably only moved in last week. Kuroo can’t pinpoint the border separating his life of empty elevator rides and the one with the stranger, but it’s not a bad change. If anything, it makes his skin tingle with the promise of something, anything, changing gears and upsetting the balance.

A new routine falls into place: the boy comes to the florist every Thursday afternoon.

“Four-hundred-seventy,” Kuroo grasps the stems of the carnations that the boy slides over the counter, wrapping it up in butcher’s paper and tying it off with a ribbon.

He worries the inside of his lip, wondering if he should call out and make the connection. Something like, _hey don’t we live in the same flat?_ The words dry up on his tongue when he lifts his head from the cashier draw to find that the boy has gone.

/

“I just don’t know what to say to him,” Kuroo smashes the buttons of his controller, watching in dismay as his character falls off the edge of _Rainbow Road_ and into oblivion.

“That’s a first,” Bokuto says between gritted teeth as his whole body rocks to the left when he tries to make a turn. Kuroo tuts when he makes it. “Suck it!” Bokuto crows with a grin.

Yoshi is dropped down onto the racetrack again by the benevolent cloud, and Kuroo resumes his button smashing. He’s never been good at this game, anyway. “I know,” he says a little mournfully. “It doesn’t sit well with me, you know? Not knowing what to say.”

Bokuto shrugs as he flies through in first place. “A socially anxious geek would kill you for that,” he says matter-of-factly. “Privileged people never know they’re privileged.”

 

/

 

It doesn’t work out the way that Kuroo planned.

The thing with the elevator is that it plays music - something that he would very much appreciate, given any other genre of music to choose from. Just not this. And not in a situation like this.

Kuroo grips his stack of mint-fresh manga to his chest as the music starts, a spine-tingling music box rendition of Debussy’s _Clair de Lune._ His manliness all but flushes out of his system in cold sweat, as the sketchy light in the elevator flickers on and off twice. This is how horror movies start, and Kuroo has unwittingly played right into the character trope of _The Weaboo Who Is Killed First._

He meets the gaze of the boy for one second before feeling his heart drop to his feet. There’s something unnatural about his gold eyes - there must be. Kuroo Tetsurou, _your downfall is all your own damn fault._

“Charming music,” the boy comments.

Kuroo startles violently, dropping a volume of _Dengeki Daisy_ on the ground before flushing to his collar and bending to retrieve it. The boy gets there first, pale, long fingers closing over the spine and lifting it from the floor. He is, after all, height-wise inferior to Kuroo and therefore closer to the ground.

There’s a blank silence in which Kuroo forgets the music, and feels his heart thud painfully in preparation for judgement. He’s a respectable twenty-two year-old, after all, and all his pride would be for nothing if word gets out that he’s still stuck in that awkward puberty phase of shoujou manga.

Just as he’s about to say something, anything, to deny ownership of the book, the boy speaks up again.

“I only read up to volume ten,” he says, the monotone of his voice lifting up by a semitone in, Kuroo hopes, positive interest. “Is twelve any good?”

Kuroo swallows, “Yeah, s-she’s pretty cute,” and can literally almost feel his soul leave his body. Why the hell did he say that? Even after twenty-two years, his brain-to-mouth filter is still malfunctioning. He justifies this by reminding himself, a little extraneously, that _god, the stranger is cute. Why didn’t I notice before?_

The boy smiles slightly. “I might pick up again, then.”

Before he knows it, he’s falling out onto the carpet of the eleventh floor as the doors open again, and the boy disappears behind the elevator doors.

 

/

 

“Four-hundred-seventy,” Kuroo takes the proffered flowers and makes to wrap them up, but the boy stops him.

“It’s okay,” he says quietly, “not today.”

Kuroo nods dumbly and pushes the flowers back over the counter, pulling out the cash drawer to put away the coins.

“Carnations again?” he blurts out suddenly.

The boy looks up, eyes wide, before pursing his lips and nodding. “My mother likes them.”

He turns to leave, and Kuroo is stumbling out from behind the register, wiping clammy hands down on his apron. “Kuroo Tetsurou,” he manages, pointing to himself.

After a moment, the boy nods curtly and gestures to the front of Kuroo’s apron. “Thanks, but, nametag.”

“Oh my god,” Kuroo wheezes in mortification, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean that you were blind or anything, I just forgot I -”

“It’s fine,” the boy smiles, but this time his expression is not as controlled. He looks up from under his lashes, and his smile is almost nervous, a little shy. “Kozume Kenma.”

“Kozume,” Kuroo breathes, and waves awkwardly as the boy leaves the store.

 

/

 

When Kuroo told his parents he wanted to join the volleyball club in high school, they were all for it. He was good at it, his grades didn’t suffer, and he made his family proud by taking the team to nationals again and again.

When he mentioned being scouted for the Japan team, they were hazy and hesitant, roundabout in their rejection of the idea. “Unstable,” his father had dubbed it cautiously, and they left it at that.

When he decided he wanted to make music, they shut him down immediately.

People have laughed at him before - Kuroo lugs his guitar to the streets and tries to busk, but he’s not a perfect man and he is not a pure artist. He still desires recognition and validation, but when the notes and beat are lost under the footsteps of pedestrians hurrying along their lives, chasing the end to a day which he is not part of, he gets discouraged.

Nights spent singing at the bar are dismal compensation for the way his dream seems to be taking a downhill turn, but he takes it. He can’t not, at least not when the years flush under his skin and urge him to run harder, faster, to do something and not nothing, but only anything through which he can be true to himself.

He works hard. As hard as he can. Kuroo finishes the last year of his business degree part-time, juggling his afternoon shift at the florist and morning shift at a cafe, pulling his guitar behind him to and from the bar at night. He just doesn’t want to accept money from his parents, because that would be giving in - and he’s not done yet, he still has a ways to go.

The first orders of the day are tame, but as the hour transitions past the morning peak, people ask for progressively more complicated coffee orders. Kuroo only sometimes makes the order, fortunately; he’s kept busy enough at the counter just taking them.

Unsurprisingly, he finds his new neighbour, _Kozume_ , there as well.

“Black,” he says in his quiet voice, and Kuroo swallows.

“Yeah,” he smiles, suppressing the warmth that ignites the tips of his fingers and threatens to break out in an unseemly grin over his lips.

By the time, the queue dissipates, Kozume is still there, sitting in a corner of the cafe with a book in his hands.

Kuroo wipes his hands down by the counter and makes his way over, keeping his voice steady as he asks, “so what are you doing?”

Kozume looks up slowly, eyes glinting in the morning sunshine in an unfathomable expression. “Coding,” he says at last, lifting his book to wave it absently.

“Comp-sci major?” Kuroo winces in sympathy, having seen enough of those poor souls surviving on little more than coffee and html to have a vague sense of how life must treat them.

“I like it,” he answers with a shrug. “It’s helpful.”

Curiously, Kuroo wonders if he’s being unintentionally modest or just apathetic. Then he considers the situation. Cautiously, he wets his lips and tries to sound anything _but_ like the turbulent butterfly storm whipping up inside him. “I’m on break in ten minutes,” he says slowly, “do you have anywhere to be?”

Not his smoothest execution, by any standards, but at least he didn’t break down in a beetroot blush.

Kozume shrugs again, “not really.”

Kuroo kind of, just kind of, really wants to kick him. He clears his throat, “do you want to come with me, then? We can get something to eat and sit outside, you know, fresh air and all that.”

He’s silent for a moment, but then he smiles slightly, “sure.”

They talk, which was the plan. Kuroo can’t help feeling he hasn’t found his way to the center of Kozume just yet, which should be obvious considering their half-stranger relationship, but he’s naturally bothered by inability to understand people immediately.

“Favourite colour?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“Dream house?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Something you like to do?”

“Play games, I guess.”

Kozume doesn’t initiate very much conversation, but he settles back in a slow and gradual way. Sometimes, the only sound between them is that of his highlighter scraping over the page, or wind slapping the pages together.

Kuroo wouldn’t call himself necessarily needy, but he has functioning hormones. Almost-but-not-quite against his will, he finds his eyes drawn to the boy’s lips, the smooth expanse of his neck, the ridge of collarbones against his thin shirt.

“Kozume,” he starts without knowing what he is going to say, muche less how he is going to phrase it.

“Kenma,” the boy corrects lightly. “You’re older, anyway.”

“Kenma,” Kuroo repeats, and forgets what he wanted in the first place.

 

/

 

“I am the best friend in the world,” Bokuto whirls into his room with a wide smile.

Kuroo looks up from his desk, where he is rewriting the last of his lecture notes for business whilst imagining his brain cells dying, peeling off the surface of his brain slowly. “That’s a hefty claim,” he says, unimpressed.

Bokuto is unperturbed, and he leans in over Kuroo’s desk with mischief between his teeth. “Your little crush,” he begins, waggling his eyebrows for emphasis, “has a nice little haunt in this very building.”

“No way,” Kuroo breathes, skepticism forgotten. That would explain why he never sees the boy anywhere but in the elevator and his workplaces. Kuroo considers himself very well-explored in terms of the apartment building, and while he has deduced that the boy does not live on a higher floor than him, he hasn’t yet had a chance to find the appropriate time and place to stalk him.

“Yes way,” Bokuto grins. “Rooftop, from 5pm till 11pm. It’s usually locked, so I don’t know how he gets up there, but Akaashi has a key.”

“Dude,” Kuroo laughs as he buries his head in the crook of Bokuto’s shoulder, hugging him close.

Bokuto’s eyes are sparkling when he pulls away, “go get it.”

 

/

 

There’s no chance to try out the new information until the end of the week, when Kuroo is stumbling back after holding up his nightly bar performance alone. Bokuto had said something about a lost cat - Kuroo didn’t ask.

He makes it to the building, legs like lead as he drags himself to the elevator. Usually he would go out again, wander around until he’s tired enough to hit the bed. Tonight he doesn’t want to. Not yet.

As he punches in the button for the eleventh floor, he tucks a hand into his back pocket and his fingers catch on the spare key that Bokuto had thrown his way the other day. The memory and realisation floods him in fizzy, gaseous warmth, and his insides feel like a shaken bottle of soda.

He presses the button for the rooftop.

The elevator is empty all the way up. Not that surprising, considering the time, and Kuroo is grateful for the solace. The higher they climb, the more his stomach turns with giddy, childish excitement and slight apprehension. He doesn’t know enough about Kenma to have any idea of what to expect - in fact, this is all fairly uncharacteristic of him. A fixation on some elusive character, yes, that is his cup of tea, but not a borderline stalkerish obsession.

The knob of the rooftop door is cold in his fingers, and he barely breathes as he eases it open. The sky opens up - clouds have drowned the stars in their dark silhouettes, and light pollution from the metropolis below illuminates the edge of the roof with a soft glow.

Kuroo lets his eyes adjust to the darkness, making out a figure in the far corner. He doesn’t allow himself too much time to think it over before he’s walking towards it, feet following a one-track path to some unclear destination.

“Kenma,” he calls, and the syllables fall into the dust. The boy turns slowly, eyes bright, something cradled in his fingers.

He doesn’t ask why Kuroo is up here. He doesn’t say anything. Kuroo walks, self-conscious of every loud footfall over the asphalt.

“You missed the sunset,” Kenma says quietly.

“Was it beautiful?” Kuroo tries not to let the surprise show in his voice.

Kenma shrugs, “not really.” He turns back to the object in his hands, and as Kuroo draws near, he sees that it’s a gaming console.

For want of something better to say, Kuroo asks, “what are you playing?”

At first Kenma is silent. His fingers fly over the buttons and light flashes over his face, lightning breaking across the bridge of his nose and reflecting moving figures in his glassy eyes. “Just a game,” he says at last. “It doesn’t matter, I’ll probably finish it tonight, anyway.”

Kuroo isn’t used to feeling this gaping inability to fill in the silence. Usually, he doesn’t need to - his friends are hardly quiet. Usually, he has things to say even if there is silence, but he doesn’t now. It’s hard to say how they ended up here. Sometimes Bokuto teases him for liking the quiet, stoic types (as if he’s any different; just look at Akaashi from an outsider’s perspective) but it’s never been this hard to get a response out of anyone.

He finds that he likes it.

For the first time in a long time, Kuroo sits back in his own thoughts and quells the trembling impatience of unspoken words between his lips, comfortable to let the night spread in between them.

It could be minutes, it could be hours. Kenma is the first to break the silence, the screen on his console blacking out with a quiet click.

“I’m going back to my room,” he says.

Kuroo stretches out his limbs and stands slowly, smiling. “I will too, then.”

He pulls the rooftop door closed behind them, and it automatically locks. The stairway is dark and echoes reverberate off the walls as they make their way down a level to the elevator.

When Kuroo presses for the eleventh level, Kenma doesn’t react.

This time, he barely notices the quiet, tinkling elevator music. His palms are warm and just this side of clammy as he rests them against his sides, struggling to keep his eyes trained on the wall beside Kenma. He didn’t notice before, but the boy is so much smaller, bony shoulders swimming in his huge sweater that something warm and gushing swells in Kuroo’s chest. God, he’s _cute_.

It’s only when he’s stepping out onto his floor that he realises Kenma has followed him.

“I didn’t know you lived on this floor?” Kuroo’s brow quirks up in confusion, but Kenma only shrugs noncommittally.

“I live on this floor,” he says flatly.

“Oh, I’ve never seen you -” Kuroo gestures vaguely.

“Yeah,” Kenma says, and bites off the conversation with static faltering between them.

When they step out, Kuroo smiles a little helplessly, nervousness tugging at the corner of his lips as he waves goodbye. “I’ll see you?” he asks hopefully.

Kenma looks oddly surprised, but not in a bad way. A little curious, left a little hanging, maybe. “Sure,” he replies, and the way he answers doesn’t even up with the nonchalance of his words. Kuroo prays that they might have something. Something precious which he can’t know for sure, just yet, but the budding silhouette of a feeling that he warms between his palms and is careful not to touch in case he messes it up.

“Sure,” he echoes.

 

/

 

The night parts in its seam of starlight to fit two lonely figures on the rooftop of a nondescript apartment building, tugging their shadows behind them like heavy bundles of everything they’ve ever owned.

Kenma plays games most of the time when he is not studying. Kuroo learns to expect him with his console, expect the intensity of his gaze trained on pixelated figures over a screen, just as much as he hopes for that same impassioned glare directed his way - without the malice. Intention.

The yards between their shoulders slowly shrinks in the wash, tossed and tumbled by Kuroo’s weak attempts at conversation until Kenma makes it abundantly clear that he doesn’t need conversation to feel companionship. Kuroo agrees.

Metres, then inches, then centimetres, Kuroo invites Kenma over for his homemade concoctions of eastern-western fusion cuisine, composing of ddeokbokki fried in bolognaise sauce and the odd dry kimchi garnish, maybe onigiri in a tempered chocolate sandwich. Sometimes Kenma manages to down his whole plate, but usually they’re both left unsettled by the experience and seek out midnight haunts for a quick pick-me-up to satisfy their bellies.

Kenma doesn’t talk much. Hasn’t ever, he assures Kuroo. “I’d never really spoken to one person for more than three days,” he explains. “You’re breaking records.”

For some reason this, if anything, puts Kuroo at ease.

“I’m glad,” he teases dryly, and even if Kenma doesn’t turn his head to read the gratitude in his eyes, it’s okay. This is different, perfectly and painfully alien to him in every way. Some people drag Kuroo along like their lives are rollercoasters fit for two, but the truth is it’s only fun when they’re holding hands in the first carriage and that’s never how it works out. Two steps behind, one step ahead, Kuroo likes to think he has mastered the art of _no strings attached_.

That is, if he tries hard enough to convince himself. Nothing has felt emptier than the way his days rolled together in the heady atmosphere of an escalating relationship.

Kenma is slow to open up, quick to shut down, and frustratingly difficult to read. Kuroo catches fleeting trails of something else in his gaze, the confusing mix of soft with piercing glare, and his breath quickens.

He lets himself go slowly, wading into the water with his heart between his teeth.

 

/

 

It’s one of the nights they spend together. The night encircles them as they leave the rooftop behind, feet slapping on the stars and echoing in the elevator, snuffed out by carpet on the eleventh floor.

“Which number is your flat?” Kuroo has been debating over asking this question for a long time, and it has taken him an embarrassing while to work up the courage to try. His voice comes out cool, though, for which he is grateful.

Kenma tilts his head at him in curiousity, and for a moment Kuroo expects hin to decline - it is personal information, after all.

Instead, he surprises him, “seven.”

“I’m in three,” Kuroo offers in exchange. The hallways split but the flats just come around in a circle, meeting directly opposite the elevator. “I’ll see you?” He congratulates himself silently for his calmness.

Kenma waves without looking over his shoulder.

Kuroo hasn’t gone six steps when, all of a sudden, the corridor is plunged into darkness.

A moment later, something soft touches his arm and he nearly jumps out of his skin. “Me,” a voice says quietly by his side, and it’s almost lost in the jackhammering of his heart.

“Kenma?” Kuroo squints as his eyes adjust, and makes out the shape of Kenma’s figure beside him. “Are you - ?”

There’s only silence.

“There must have been a blackout,” he says weakly. The darkness doesn’t bother him much, but being in a silent hallway with uneasy quiet smothering his senses is not exactly comforting. Kenma doesn’t make a sound, and barely moves.

“Do you,” Kuroo tries again, “not like the dark?”

There’s a flash, and he has to shut his eyes against the glare of Kenma’s console screen. “No,” he answers shortly. Kuroo grins.

“Come to my place?” he suggests, brave. “I’ll phone for maintenance.”

Kenma nods his head slowly in assent. Cautiously, Kuroo fits his hand around the boy’s elbow and guides the down the hallway by the light of Kenma’s console, wishing that he had his phone on him. He’s fairly sure he knows the way, though.

“You know, Bokuto would be freaking out big time if this were him,” he says conversationally, craning his neck to check the numbers over the doorways. “You’re pretty calm for someone who doesn’t like the dark.”

“Not really,” Kenma shrugs. “I don’t hate the dark. I’m just not that comfortable with it.”

His tone is flat, but Kuroo unearths the slightest hint of petulance and nervousness under his syllables. He makes sure to hold Kenma just a little closer, enjoying the heat that blooms under his skin, even as it melts against Kenma’s cold touch.

“Is Bokuto a friend of yours?”

“Yeah,” Kuroo smiles. “Hard to say how well you’ll get along, but he’s a nice person.”

They make it to Kuroo’s place without any trouble, and he putters around setting up candles as Kenma curls his knees up to his chest on the living room couch.

After the apartment is welcomingly lit with little haloes of gold all around the rooms, Kuroo turns to the phone he left in his room, punching in the number for maintenance.

The man on the other end sounds gruff but apologetic, promising that they would fix the power outage as soon as possible. _“We’ve had many phone calls about it,”_ he huffs a laugh.

Kuroo has barely ended the call when his phone is lighting up again, this time with an overexcited Bokuto on the other end.

 _“Dude! It’s the perfect time for horror night,”_ he says without preamble.

“Now?” Kuroo furrows his brow skeptically, peering into the lounge where Kenma has occupied himself with investigating the candles in close detail. “Kenma’s over.”

_“Bring him, too!”_

“Where’s Akaashi?” Kuroo asks in favour of answering the plea.

 _“Here,”_ Bokuto hisses. _“I bet I could make him scared enough to cuddle.”_

“Oh my god, gross,” Kuroo wrinkles his nose. “Look, I’ll ask, okay?”

He ends the call and pads into the lounge. Kenma looks up curiously, “going somewhere?”

His quiet voice does nothing to hide the way his hands drop from their resting places at the table beside the candle, like he’s afraid of being caught.

“Bokuto invited us for a night of horror,” he explains. “Which, by his standards, would mean Hitchcock and botched ghost stories. You have no obligation to accept or decline.”

Kenma surprises him, yet again, by shrugging. “I don’t really care. Let’s go.”

 

/

 

Perhaps it is only to be expected, by Akaashi is very, very good at telling ghost stories. He holds the torch under his chin, lashes lit in bright relief against his shadowed face, lips parting like the jaws of some deformed ghost that Kuroo’s imagination has invented for its own torture.

Bokuto clutches his arm in a vice-like grip, eyes and mouth gaping like a fish. Kuroo doesn’t tell him so; he looks too high-strung to react.

“The man decided to disregard the advice,” Akaashi continues in a low voice. It doesn’t even look like he’s trying, Kuroo muses. Kenma rests his chin over his knees beside him, breaths soft.

“Of course he did,” Bokuto squeaks in weak protest. “Can we stop?”

“Weak,” Kuroo prods him with a finger, and Bokuto stiffens.

“So he looked through the keyhole,” Akaashi smiles slightly, “and everything was red.”

Kuroo presses a finger against Bokuto’s nape and he leaps to his feet with a yelp, eyes as wide as saucers. “Fuck you,” he whispers, lips twisting into a grimace of betrayal as he sits back down.

“This happened for three nights in a row, and the man decided to ask the old man about what he knew.”

The room leaps into blinding light.

There is a small sequence of yelps on Bokuto’s part, as everyone squeezes their eyes shut against the onslaught of light. “I guess the power’s back?” Kuroo smiles as he inches his eyes open carefully, only to close them again.

“It’s almost two in the morning,” Akaashi says. “Do you want to stay the night?”

They're three floors under the eleventh floor, but Kuroo feels exhaustion wash over him. “Can we?” he blurts out before he has time to reconsider.  
  
After a pause, Kenma cuts in softly, “I’ll go.”

“I’m so sorry,” Kuroo exclaims, stumbling to his feet. “I wasn’t thinking.” Something cold and shameful creeps over his skin and he rubs at his arms, eyes trained on Kenma’s small figure on the ground. Guilt eats at him as he looks at him, whose presence was so easy to miss, far too easy to miss.

“I’ll walk you back?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kenma shakes his head. He gathers up his console and brushes the wrinkles from his shirt, the hint of a smile in the corner of his lips. “I’ll see you.”

“No,” Kuroo is adamant. He ushers Kenma to the doorway, calling goodbye over his shoulder and postponing the sleepover. Akaashi waves to him as the door closes.

Outside, in the eighth floor corridor, light flares against the walls as Kuroo switches on each one along the way to the elevator. If Kenma notices, he doesn’t mention it.  
  
“Let’s take the stairs,” he offers suddenly, and Kuroo halts in his step.

“Sure,” he agrees, a collected reply completely at odds with the way his stomach flips over at the suggestion. Not out of fear - it’s just, for the past few days he has been settling back. Watching his life steer away, just close enough within control but not something actively directed.

Kenma’s intrusion into his routine is refreshing and also disarmingly unexpected. Embarrassing heat floods his cheeks as he remembers the cause for their stilted and nervous relationship; Kuroo had forgotten about his crush. It comes back in full force, blasting him back with the way that Kenma looks at him, eyes wide and uneasy, questioning his hesitance.

His fingers itch to curl around his shoulder, to brush the hair from his forehead. Every night, in the darkness under a waxing moon and drowned-out starlight, the simmering anticipation blossoming in his gut grows with the way their companionship comes so easily, yet simultaneously in such a surprising and impromptu manner.

He likes him, a little, a lot.

Kenma walks ahead when he sees Kuroo move, and the stairs echo with their footsteps. Swallowing around the lump in his throat, Kuroo ventures, “why did you want to take the stairs?”

“No reason,” Kenma shrugs. He tugs his shirt lower as they climb, and moonlight falls from a window on the ninth-floor landing to illuminate his skin.

Then, umprompted, “do you like horror stories?”

“Do you?” Kuroo frowns in concern, “was that uncomfortable for you?”

“Not really,” Kenma says, like he always does, but this time he laughs. It makes Kuroo’s fingers curl into his palm and a dizzying warmth explodes inside his ribs. “I like them.”

They huff their way to their floor, and the hallway is still as silent as before when they walk down, but this time Kuroo is not as uncomfortable.

“Did you know that if you look into a keyhole and it’s dark, it means someone is looking back at you?” Kenma looks over his shoulder at Kuroo, who purses his lips doubtfully.

“What brought this on?” he asks. Kenma stops in front of a room labelled with the number _7_ engraved in a metal plaque over the doorway, and fits a key to the lock.

“I don’t know,” he shrugs, but his eyes sparkle with humour. “Goodnight, Kuroo.”

“Goodnight.” Kuroo feels like a mixture of stone and combusted chemical waste.

 

/

 

“You lying son of a liar,” Bokuto bites accusingly when Kuroo tells him about keyholes.

“Which bone in my body?” Kuroo smiles.

Bokuto bends down to inspect the next keyhole they pass, and stands up almost immediately with a stiff spine.

Kuroo laughs.

 

/

 

Every weekend, his mother calls him. She’s a bold woman, sharp-tongued and big-boned, by her hands are always soft.

 _“Bring me some calla lilies,”_ she instructs, in a voice that allows no room for refusal.

“Will do,” Kuroo agrees warmly. It’s a lie - they both know it. He’s not going to go home until he can prove himself in Tokyo, prove that his dreams are more than feathered pillow machinations. It’s hard to say, now, whether he’s avoiding home more because of his father’s disappointment or his own ambition to grow.

He attends to the florist, in the afternoon, looks over the tops of buildings to stare longingly at the silhouette of _Tokyo University of the Arts_ during his break. Kenma stops by once, buying another bouquet of carnations, before smiling his rare smile and ducking out.

The university is accepting applications, soon, second semester admission in early November. Kuroo is always thinking, _maybe this year_ , but he’s gutless and afraid. If he’s rejected, what will that mean for his music? Every little conflict he as ironed out with his father has been for this school. Maybe they don’t manufacture rock artists along a production line, but all he has ever, _ever_ wanted to do was music. Maybe volleyball  for a time.

In the evening, as he changes shifts with a new girl whose name he has forgotten to ask for, he goes home to change before heading to the bar.

Shaking out his limbs as he wanders down the corridor, crisp work shirt exchanged for a comfortable shirt and jeans, Kuroo nearly runs physically into Kenma.

“Where are you going?” he asks, noticing the absence of his gaming console.

“Where are you?” Kenma counters, but without an edge.

Kuroo hasn’t told him about this part of his life yet. It is, arguably, the thing he is most afraid and yet most desperate to disclose - a need for validation flares inside him as he considers.

“Singing,” he says at last, voice soft. Kenma looks mildly surprised.

“Where?”

“Interested?” Kuroo grins as Kenma frowns. “In the bar across the road. Feel free to come by, if you like.”

Kenma shrugs, “maybe.” Then he hesitates. “Let me get changed?”

  
Kuroo’s heart jumps to his throat, and he nods mutely. “Of course.”

 


End file.
